Big or Small Old or New 

Since we started offering our specialist data recovery services back in 1998 () storage device capacity and speed has increased almost exponentially. New disks at the time were 6-30GB, but many disks we saw were much older and lower capacity. Now it’s common to see 8TB+ disks and even 100TB. Also physical storage device size has reduced to a mere 2.5″ form factor for a 100TB SSD or 6TB mechanical hard drive, and even smaller for “blade” SSD’s. 

Keeping up with changing technology is crucial in being able to offer data recovery for the latest storage devices. 

We do still see vintage storage come in for data recovery. From floppy disks, CDR and DVD+/-Rs, as well as removable cartridge media of all types, and of course old hard drives. So we need to keep old technology knowledge and hardware to support these old devices.

We’ve seen many trends come and go during our time:

• External drives with soldered USB-interfaces instead of removable bridge boards (which are now the norm).
• External RAID drives, required when disk capacities weren’t growing fast enough.
• The move from spinning disks to Solid State Drives
• Storage chips soldered directly to motherboards instead of discrete removable drives.
• Data stored on phones!

We’ll see if the trend towards AI starts affecting storage drives too.

Watch this space!

Big or Small Old or New  Dataquest - DataQuest - Don't Quit